HDMI sound cards

[Clackdor 109]

This is more of a rant than anything, but does anyone else remember these? From what I recall only two manufacturers ever made them around the late 2000's/early 2010's. Auzentech had an X-FI model and Asus had one or two models.

These were from a time where GPU's were primarily still only shipping with DVI. HDMI was just starting to make it into the GPU market, and even then it could initially only do PCM 2.0 over HDMI or with a DVI to HDMI dongle.

Both of them required you to plug a video input via an adapter into the HDMI in and the HDMI out would go to your receiver. You would then be able to play 5.1 or 7.1 PCM through your receiver and still have eq settings, stereo upmixing, hardware acceleration, etc. done by the sound card and it's software. This was a major feature if you had an HDMI capable receiver that you wanted to game through on PC at that time.

In hindsight these probably never really caught on because they were being targeted at very niche markets for the time period and HDMI audio support caught up on PC not long after.

I know soundcards aren't nearly as important as they used to be for either PC gaming or home theater, but a big part of me wishes something like this was made today. The audio experience on windows is feeling increasingly bland these days.

[Neminem 1516]

I remember, I used some sort of creative sound blaser cards back in the day.

I just had to look them up again, but could not find the card I used back then.

But they still make sound cards.

Sound Blaster AE-Series - The Best Internal PCI-e DAC and Amp Sound Cards for PC - Creative Labs (Pan Euro) 

[Clackdor 109]

@NeminemI was actually still using my old creative X-FI Fatal1ty titanium pro up until about a year ago or so. I started having issues with the drivers after updating to the latest build of windows 10 and the situation was no better under windows 11. It sucked having to remove it. Considering the card came out in 2008 I wasn't surprised though.

My biggest issue with creative's lineup since the x-fi has been lack of discreet 7.1 analog outputs. The most they support is 5.1. The X-FI was also the last card to support hardware accelerated EAX and OpenAL for older games that used it.

As far as the whole HDMI sound card thing, here's an old review I found for the auzentech one. This and the one Asus made are to my knowledge the only discreet HDMI capable sound cards ever made. I always thought it was a cool concept to be able to bitstream lossless digital audio over HDMI and still have all of the control and features of the software.

https://aphnetworks.com/reviews/auzentech_x_fi_hometheater_hd